Feels good to have taken a step back from active engagement on social media. It’s like a weight has been lifted. I am liberated from the burden of being compelled to say something about everything. People have stopped engaging with my tweets. It is beautiful. And so my focus on the really important work – the research – has become sharper. One chapter from my PhD dissertation is now submitted to be considered for publication. Revisions to another chapter have begun, and on it goes. But I have only done a little bit of work and have decided that’s that for the day. A pause is necessary. Besides, the heat is unbearable, the air unbreathable, the city insufferable.
The truth is that the work is a welcome respite from a deep misery I feel on many if not most days. Some reasons for my misery are clear enough but some remain elusive. I made a commitment to myself to take on the calendar year without spending time and energy on therapy, so that option is absent. That means that I have needed to practice self-care and self-inquiry differently, which has in the recent past meant burying myself in work. There is a comfort in it because it requires me to be practical rather than wallow in sentimentality. Far from letting me run from my emotions, the work in its practicality not only allows me to engage with my emotional life but requires that I do so in a healthy way.
Nevertheless, I continue to feel miserable. My wife recently did a pencil sketch of me on a late night when I was feeling anxious and couldn’t sleep. I think it captures something true about me. Perhaps when I amount to something as an economist many years down the line, I will use it on the dust jacket of one of my books. For now it graces my home page. To capture and convey some truth — that is the work.
Daniyal Khan 